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Tune in Tuesday, January 10, at 7PM (PST), as KXLU Los Angeles proudly presents Center Stage with Mark Gordon featuring special guests Charles Evans Jr. & Victor DeNoble. The will be talking about the new documentary ADDICTION INCORPORATED.

SYNOPSIS:

In 1994, scientist Victor DeNoble became the first whistleblower to reveal the tobacco industry’s efforts to manufacture “a maximally addictive” product. Tasked in the 1980s by a major tobacco company to invent a safer form of nicotine — one that would decrease the danger of heart failure while remaining just as addictive (so smokers could live, and smoke, longer) — DeNoble succeeded. But, in doing so, he inadvertently created indisputable evidence that nicotine was addictive, something the tobacco companies had long denied. His position was terminated, his lab was closed, and both his research and the “safer cigarette” were buried in the vaults and kept from the public…until he broke his confidentiality agreement and became the ultimate whistleblower.

ADDICTION INCORPORATED, Charles Evans Jr.’s taut, journalistic exposé made over the course of 15 years, tells the riveting story of DeNoble’s journey from research scientist to star informant. After testifying before Congressional committees, the FDA and Al Gore’s Tobacco Settlement Committee, DeNoble has become America’s peripatetic anti-smoking advoMONDcate par excellence. Evans marshals classic footage including that of the CEOs of the seven leading tobacco companies testifying under oath that they do not believe that nicotine is addictive; Rep. Thomas J. Bliley, Jr. (R-VA) likening the government’s treatment of the tobacco industry to McCarthyism; and, highlights of the $10 billion lawsuit filed by Philip Morris against the ABC television network.

Today, the story continues to unfold as provisions of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act begin to go into effect, empowering the FDA to require that cigarette packages display disturbing photographs of rotting teeth and blackened lungs, ban sweetened cigarettes targeted to children, and prohibit “light” and “low tar” labeling by fall 2012. The new law also allows the FDA to reduce nicotine in cigarettes to near nil, a prospect that could put big tobacco out of business. With new restrictions fast approaching, the tobacco companies are rolling up their sleeves and arming themselves for litigation — again.

If you think you know everything there is to know about cigarettes and nicotine, ADDICTION INCORPORATED will startle you with its vital, previously undisclosed information. Straight from the mouths of the key players behind the scenes (interviewees include Steven C. Parrish, the former Senior VP and General Counsel for External Affairs at Philip Morris), ADDICTION INCORPORATED reveals exactly how the tobacco industry achieved behemoth power through scientific secrecy…and what their next move may be.

Addiction Incorporated opens in New York on December 14 at Film Forum and in Los Angeles on January 13 at Landmark’s Nuart and in San Francisco n January 20.